@The Indomitable Gall

Remember, the leccy vans are not being driven off the alkaline batteries (the kind you put in your telly remote) but rather rechargable ones, with a (hopefully) average life of 8-10 years.

Electricity is one of the *most* efficient (in terms of transportability - aka power grid and energy-input-to-work-done ratio - aka motors) around. Plus, as @vision aforethought pointed out, it is FAR easier to clean up ONE huge power plant (or stick it in the middle of nowhere and ship electricity out) than it is to cleanup the tons of pollutants being put out by carbon-fuel-powered engines in the cities and town everywhere.

Plus, once you've got the "last mile" (so to say) sorted out, you can concentrate on efficiencies and greenizing the generation (hydro-electric, nuclear,wind, whatever) and get rid of the pesky pollutants in one (or a few) fell swoops.

@Herby, @Jake

@Herby - According to CA DOT's website, the fine is $20 for the first offense, and $50 for subsequent offenses, no points (after "penalty assessments" it is 3x that, but they've not specified the conditions). So no, Blighty is not a lot cheaper than in California.

@Jake - I do. A lot. So does my mom (and she's almost 60 - definitely an "old fart" :). It's an excellent way to get a non-urgent message across without interrupting what the other person is doing. Maybe she wants to tell me something when it's 3am for me. Maybe I want to do the reverse. Or text from the airport saying "got flight, on time, see you at 2230". Just because YOU don't see the utility doesn't mean there isn't one. I'd never have expected Twitter to be so popular, and I'm not yet 30. </rant>

@Bill Ray - author's clarification

[quote] The author's contention is that those writing that software will, in response to Apple's threats, be unable to make a living, and that many of them will therefore withdraw support - leaving stolen software the primary motivation for Jailbraking [end quote]

My contention is that the author doesn't quite get how the "free software" community works (would use stronger terms, but I'll refrain for now). The developers who would put their software on the official App Store *for free* would just as readily put their app elsewhere *for free*. All that Apple ensures is pissing off (and eventually losing) developers who really want to run whatever they want to on hardware that *they paid for* (as others have pointed out before me). That's (part of) the reason that Windows is as ubiquitous as it is today - M$ did not lock in their userbase to their own whims and fancies (at least not to the extent that Apple does).

I need a new phone (my good ol' Nokia workhorse died yesterday) and the iPhone is off my list for precisely this reason - I love the phone, but hate the Apple baggage that comes with it.

Yet more reason to support the EFF

EFF, and now Skype and Mozilla are fighting Apple's "DMCA Rights" (yeah right) which attempt to make jailbreaking punishable with jail time.

If I choose to bonk somebody over the head with an iPhone, Apple isn't going to go DMCA over me, yet they *absolutely* control what apps can and cannot go on the iPhone. Hopefully the EFF wins, or we'll have to bash the "Thinnest and Lightest CEO Ever" on the head with a million iPhones to make our point.

Great Tits maybe

@Aron - bombay / mumbai?

Um, no. Bombay is what the "settlers" (first the Portuguese, then the British) changed it TO. Similar changes in India:

Pune became Poona (it always was Pune, or rather "Punyanagari", i.e. the town of good deeds). Kolkata became Calcutta. Thiruvananthapuram became Trivendrum. Chennai became Madras (no clue why Chennai was so difficult, but then I'm Indian so I wouldn't ;)

Parry Lage?

Hmm ... isn't the point of the Google Spycar throwing things in the open? So why is the name of said exec blacked out in the comments when it is plainly visible in the URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/01/nlpc_outs_larry_page/comments/

Power of Information Taskforce ?

@Actually (gman)

BT works by "grabbing all the download bandwidth" to pull data, and "grabbing all the upload bandwidth" to push data. If it so happens that the peers you have are all on choked 10 kbps connections, you never will get very much download speed, even if your actual line speed is 10 Mbps.

The problem with BT is not that it grabs up to the limit (where the limit can be reduced by a sufficiently clueful user - or a clueful ISP tech who tells the user), but rather that people don't know about this limit (like Mark said) and let it suck up the whole available pipe.

On the you-get-what-you-share note: my BT client happily pulls at 500 KBps (i.e. close to 4Mbps) even with an upload cap of about 500 Kbps (around 60 KB/s) - i.e. a 10:1 on down:up.

The other problem with BT is due to the nature of P2P traffic - if you have 200 connections, you are also sending data to 200 connections (as against FTP where you have only 1 connection). Routing 200 connections across the series of tubes is a lot more CPU intensive than routing one. And when you have a million people, the hardware capacity maxes out disproportionately quickly (possibly even before the backhaul pipe maxes out) - it would be interesting if any of you who work at an ISP can post stats about this!

Like AC from OZ said before me - transparency is the key. If you know exactly what you signed up for, and you and the ISP both stick to what you signed up for, there wouldn't be this discussion to begin with!

Dynamic Throttling?

Throttling users based on how much they peak at? That's a load of bollocks (cajones?) given that they are striving to reduce overall network load.

The way I see it is this (and IANACCIJKLNMOP, so YMMV and all that):

If I am torrenting the latest and greatest file (say, Kubuntu-8.04), at peak speed (I am on 6 Mbit down / 768 up) I get maybe 400-500 KBps, and the ISO is down in a few minutes. After this is done, I would most likely be playing with the new ISO, and my internet usage would be fairly low for the most part.

If I get throttled 5 minutes into my download, not only is my average speed going down (thereby increasing my wait == my frustration at "this sh*t internet connection"), I'm also INCREASING the network load (due to their own SYN reset policy - no resets happen till I begin seeding).

A much better alternative (and something that I as a user would surely appreciate) is to give the customer 2 options (sorry Simon!)

1: If you intend to use BitTorrent a lot, you can use it (unrestricted) during our off-peak (say 12 midnight to 8am). In such a case, your daytime use will be restricted to (say) 1 Mbps max.

2: If you are not a heavy P2P user, we'll give you unrestricted access all day, but slow you down if you exceed (e.g. X GB/week)

Might as well get me coat while I wait for ISPs to start making sensible decisions (and I *have* worked at a small one, mind).

A man from mars

@Skilled Citizens

I personally (being an H1B on the wrong side of the pond) think there are a couple of factors at play here:

1a. A lot of Indians (like many others) see the US as a "holy grail" to be achieved no matter what. If this means working 14+ hrs a day @ $20/hr + a bunk for the night, so be it.

1b. Some people need to move to the US due to some external constraint, but have to use the method below anyway.

2. A lot of these "consulting companies" (also called "body shoppers" in India) exist solely due to the convoluted and impossible-to-obtain work permit (i.e. the H1B) regulations in the US. As a brief background, only your employer can file for a H1B, and that too only as long as their yearly cap has not been met. The applications are accepted starting on the first working day in April, but even after approval, the employee is not allowed to work till 1st October. So what these "consultanting companies" do is to create a "vacancy", apply for a H1B on behalf of a person who falls into category 1a or 1b, resulting in said person getting the H1B. In addition, they have some ridiculous employment clauses (which, to quote the BoFH would hold as much water as a paper g-string). Unfortunately, the 1a people are afraid of the employment clauses and will stick with said consulting companies (oft times getting royally shafted).

3. Most people (esp. the 1a) will work long hours simply to try and "impress" their managers (who, unless they are Indians on an H1B themselves, have no problems with employees sticking to a 40-ish hour / week schedule), resulting in them being in the office for 10+ hrs a day (I wonder how much *real* work they do, but thats a different rant). All this means I may be expected to put in long hours all the time (even though I *want* to work only 8h/day) because of the bad example set by those before me. Doubly so if my manager is an H1B who had to suffer the 12+ h/days.

4. Add to this the extremely lax employment law enforcement in the US (especially in the Tech sector) about 40h/wk. limits (A friend who had gone on-site to Germany was told by the German team manager to be out of the office by 6pm, otherwise the team in Germany could face serious legal complications - this on the 3rd day he was there of a ~1 month stint)

It is easy to blame it on the H1Bs, but things go much deeper than that.

@Waste

Unfortunately, a lot of the Indian IT companies are singularly focussed on the US market (not to mention that any hollywood movies would not reference 112, possibly even in a european setting!) so I doubt most Indians know what 112 is (except a secret handset unlock code on our mobes, with calls being blackholed).

Traditionally, we have used 100/101/102 for Police/Fire/Ambulance services, but I can never remember which is for which, so a unified number is certainly a good thing.

Mine's the one with the wig, the fake beard and a chain of 108 Rudrakshas hidden in the inner pocket

7 days ?!?

One of my big beefs with the UK banks - in India, all local cheques are cleared within *one* working day (outstation cheques take a while longer owing to the fact that not all banks are connected up at a central clearinghouse).

Fine - let cheques take 7 working days. But why does an "on-line transfer" take 3 working days?